UPDATE: The Refugee Crisis and Returning Home

By Gilbert Benavidez, PHP Fellow

July 21, 2017

News

In March I wrote about the world’s response to a massive refugee and displaced persons crisis. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) has since come out with new data showing that the problems are getting even worse.

Three statistics jump out at me as particularly important:

• 67.75 million people are now considered to be ‘persons of concern.’ Persons of concern is a catchall designation that is made up not just of refugees, but also of internally displaced persons (IDPs), asylum-seekers, stateless persons, and returnees, among others. The number of persons of concern is nearly 4 million more than at the end of 2015.

• 5 million people have returned to their country of origin. This is the biggest data swing in the 2016 data. For example, more than 600,000 displaced Syrians returned to their original homes even though much of Syria is left in ruins. In Iraq, 1.40 million people have made their way home with UNHCR help. In Yemen, bombing campaigns and drought are still ravaging the country, but 974,059 have returned.

• The number of IDPs in Colombia increased from 6.9 million to 7.4 million, very nearly matching the number at Syria’s peak during their civil war. IDP numbers have also gone up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Somalia, Afghanistan, Ukraine and South Sudan because of war, drought, famine, disease, and extreme poverty.

Gilbert Benavidez received his MPH at the Boston University School of Public Health, where his concentration was health law, bioethics and human rights. He is primarily interested in international human rights law and policy and the associated interactions with socio-political developments. He also loves pizza and sushi.